Kids These Days...

Rocks Off is following our sister Houston Press blogs into the choppy waters of "Comment of the Day," choosing a comment or a handful of comments from the previous day we find especially enlightening, infuriating or just plain hilarious. We're glad our readers have opinions, whatever they are, about what we write, and encourage them to keep 'em coming.

This morning's comment(s) of the day come from the interesting discussion sparked by Jef With One F's blog about how his travels selling sheet music to area high schools led him to notice a lot more students are wearing classic-rock bands' T-shirts than current hitmakers' gear.

"To judge by apparel alone, the vast majority of musical youth is engaged in looking backwards, rather than forwards," he wrote.

Here's what you said:

Josh Webster:

It has always been that way, even old music like Zeppelin is "new" the first time you hear it. As a teenager, I thought '70s rock was awesome, because I wasn't sick of it yet. You probably had a "Master of Puppets" T shirt in high school too (I did) even though you were just a kid when it came out.

Good music is good music. Besides, today's indie scene is probably inaccessable to all but the "hippest" of kids, nobody but metal and Scout-Bar-Butt-Rock bands market to anyone but the Pitchfork crowd.

steve:

To Josh, thats the problem. The new (good) music today has the connotation of being a hipster or being straight indie (whatever that means). It's almost impossible to like a band such as Animal Collective without being thrown into a category of being a hipster. Whereas when you were called a metal head or a punk you took a certain pride to it, the problem with being called a hipster is that you automatically try to deny it, because being labeled is not a part of being the new "counter culture."

Thus kids dont want to be seen listening to these bands for fear of being unfairly categorized. It can also reflect the state of radio these days. I mean, if all I heard was Lady Gaga and Kesha and shit like that, I would definitely turn and stick to Zeppelin or other classic rock acts.

I know for me, my journey into new music started with Zeppelin and the Beatles. I started looking for bands that sounded like them, found Wolfmother and Dr. Dog and from then on I just kept digging deeper. Its a process for sure.

And Josh again:

All that being said, there is no excuse for not finding new music nowadays. If you told me about about a cool new band, I could own their record literally within minutes, maybe even for free, as is the case with lots of indie (as in unsigned, not jorts-and-ironic-teeshirt-wearing) bands.

Maybe that's the problem. Remember how much fun record stores were when you were a kid? Reading through the liner notes while you listened to that new CD...